UP: It lets us state intent in plain language, specs, or examples. We can ask the model to invent code, tests, docs, diagrams—tasks that previously needed human translation from intention to syntax.
BUT SIDEWAYS: Generation is a probability distribution over tokens. Outputs vary with sampling temperature, seed, context length, and even with identical prompts.
I think the tricky part is that we tend to think that prompts with similar semantic meaning will give the same outputs (like a human), while LLMs can give vastly different outputs if you have one spelling mistake for example, or used "!" instead of "?", the effect varies greatly per model.
To your second part I wouldn't make that assumption - I can see how a non-technical person might, but surely programmers wouldn't? I've certainly produced very different output from that which I intended in boring old C with a mis-placed semi-colon after all!
I don't think that's how you should think about these things being non-deterministic though.
Let's call that technical determinism, and then introduce a separate concept, practical determinism.
What I'm calling practical determinism is your ability as the author to predict (determine) the results. Two different prompts that mean the same thing to me will give different results, and my ability to reason about the results from changes to my prompt is fuzzy. I can have a rough idea, I can gain skill in this area, but I can't gain anything like the same precision as I have reasoning about the results of code I author.
Implementations and architectures are different enough that it's hard to say "It's like X" in all cases. Last time I tried to achieve 100% reproducible outputs, which obviously includes hard-coding various seeds, I remember not getting reproducible outputs unless setting temperature to 0, I think this was with Qwen2 or Qwq used via Huggingface's Transformers library, but cannot find the exact details now.
Then in other cases, like the hosted OpenAI models, they straight up say "temperature to 0 makes them mostly deterministic", but I'm not exactly sure why they are unable to offer endpoints with determinism.
> I can see how a non-technical person might, but surely programmers wouldn't?
When talking even with developers about prompting and LLMs, there is still quite a few people who are surprised that "You are a helpful assistant." would lead to different outputs than "You are a helpful assistant!". I think if you're a programmer or not matters less, more about understanding how the LLMs actually work in order to understand that.
> I think if you're a programmer or not matters less, more about understanding how the LLMs actually work in order to understand that.
Sounds like I need to understand them better then as I merely had different misaprehensions than those. More reading for me...